For the past two years, Tal R has been drawing women in confined interior spaces – hotel rooms, bedrooms, corridors, in the shower, and in front of mirrors. Though carefully chosen, his subjects are strangers and casual acquaintances. Tal R’s artistic process begins when he asks the women to pose for him: the foundation of his paintings rest on the anxiety of an uncertain exchange. This provides his work with palpable intensity and, as he notes, “awkwardness,” and is further emphasized by his use of saturated color and off-kilter compositions. Though central to the image, the female figures merge with their patterned, object-filled environments, often becoming abstracted or distorted. Tal R toys with perception and perspective, both actual and psychological, within the boundaries of narrative space, echoing the shifting rapport between the artist and his anonymous subject. Painting with vivid pigments and fast-drying rabbit-skin glue, it is necessary for him to work quickly. Though this limits some of the more time-consuming delineations of his on-site drawings, it also permeates Tal R’s paintings with visceral emotion.